THE FRESCOES OF MICHELANGELO AND THE WORD OF JOHN PAUL II

The Sistine Chapel crossed its architectural dimension and put Michelangelo and John Paul II into an interdisciplinary discourse. The Pope assumed that a substantial factor of an artistic work was not its autonomy, but its transcendental value, realized in various artistic structures. Therefore, he was not interested in the painting aspects of the Sistine frescoes. Like Buonarotti, John Paul II looked for transcendental senses in a plastic work. The former tried to present those messages in a plastic vision, the latter attempted to express them in a literary way. And on such a plane the word met with the painting, which had inspired it. Reinforcement of text by picture failed to produce the expected effects - it disallowed to depict the Invisible. Besides mysticism, there appeared one more way of cognition, namely the meditation. The first kind of perception was to manifest supernatural matters, while the other pertained to human nature. Finally the author argues that 'Meditations' unpenetrated the Mystery but 'reached the audience'.